[travjack36]

I just found this site and decided to give it a try. I got my 2005 Prius at the end of May and love it.

However in October I got stuck in a huge traffic jam on I-5 south of Portland....nearly 3 hours.....big crash....heavy rain.....had just filled the tank....but.....creeping along so slowly couldn't really turn off the car but moved so little the battery couldn't seem to re-charge.

I would watch it go down to the bottom 2 bars on the screen gauge and started getting nervous about whether it was going to be discharged, but couldn't find any way to get it to start running the gas motor to bring up the charge level.

I asked the service dept. at my dealer and they said the computer would take care of the problem automatically if it got too low, but I had never seen it show such a low charge before or since. Is there any reason to be concerned when it shows such a low level of charge?

Are there any techniques I should have tried to get it to charge a little more when I could only creep along the road occasionally?